Pages

Thursday, January 9, 2014

How Popular is Our New HSA?

Not quite as popular as the color purple...

ASHA Staff on Spirit Day
Photo by Ben Sledge

We introduced a high deductible health plan with an HSA as a new option for 2014. It is a pretty appealing plan with ASHA funding half the deductible for staff. Now that open enrollment is behind us. I took a few minutes to look at the selections staff made.

272 eligible staff

227 (83%) participate

106 (47%) chose the Choice Plan (network only)

81 (36%) chose the
Choice Plus Plan

40 (18%) chose the new HSA

12 (30%) of the staff
in the HSA maxed out their contributions – A good sign that they are using it
as a longer term savings vehicle.

2 (50%) of the HR team selected the new HSA. (That includes me.)

I did lose a bit of sleep at end of the year worrying about the people that elected the HSA spending all the money they had in their 2013 FSA. I had been advised to eliminate the grace period on our FSA to ease the transition, but I had shrugged off the advice confident that I could communicate this requirement to our well educated and engaged staff. (You are ineligible to open an HSA if you have an FSA. You can learn more about that in this post.) In the end, everyone did, but not before a lot a fretting on the part of the HR team and a series of phone calls, emails and personal visits. (Six of the 40 people still had account balances on December 30.) Here's an example of a message I sent in one of our last ditch efforts to compel folks to spend down their FSAs. It seemed to get people's attention.

I know Emily’s been in touch
with you and you realize you have to spend that last $13.80 in your FSA today
or tomorrow to close it. One thing you could do is go into the FSA store and
buy some things using your card. Here’s a link -- https://fsastore.com/

If you submit a receipt now,
Flexcorp won’t have time to process it and close your account before the new
year. So, it’s a little late to wrap things up that way. If your FSA account is
not closed tomorrow, we won’t be able to open your HSA until April 1. That
would mean that you’d be responsible for the deductible without access to
ASHA’s contribution for the first three months of the year.

Now we are shifting our focus from educating staff on how to chose a health care plan to how to be savvy healthcare consumers.